Family history research is so fascinating that it deserves to be shared. Here are one writer's musings and insights about making that process palatable and inviting to others.

05 August 2012

Writing Up Your Family History: A Do It Yourself Guide

John Titford was the keynote speaker on Tuesday for the BYU Conference on Family History and Genealogy. His presentation on “A History of
British Accents and Dialects” was delightful and entertaining. Naturally I
hastened over to my next class to hear what he had to say about “writing up” my
family history. Following are some ideas I gleaned from his presentation.

John Titford's book

Titford’s instruction is clear and I agree completely. If
you are capable of writing a narrative family history, then do it! Family
history comes in a relatively dead form—names and dates on a paper or even a
parish register—and the much livelier version. This version was alive at the
time the person was alive and by writing the story of that person, we can again
infuse our ancestor with spiritual life. Collecting data is only a start. It is
definitely more rewarding as we analyze and synthesize our data and make it
into a story that helps the person live and breathe once more.

As if that were not enough, this type of research can also
inform our gathering of data. As we trace a life, we realize there are things
we don’t know, in fact, things “we didn’t know we didn’t know” until we started
imagining a life.

Titford gave us answers to our excuses:

I don’t have time.
Take a break from research or whatever else is so important. This is important
too.

My research isn’t
finished. That’s true enough, since our research is never finished. But we
write for this moment, this point in time. Just as in a court trial, new
evidence will emerge.

I can’t do a good
enough job. That’s perfectionism talking—Don’t listen. If I’m not so good
at writing now, I’ll learn as I go.

My software crashed.
Time to get it fixed.

My family’s story is
ordinary. That’s good, we’ll relate to it. The truth is that every story
deserves to be told.

2 comments:

I ran into your blog while doing some research on genealogy sites; my son, Eli, is currently developing a product that we think may be helpful to genealogists, and other people interested in ancestry, called Storied.

The goal of Storied is to make the process of capturing and sharing meaningful cross-generational family stories easy and accessible for people of all ages. It was inspired by hisfather-in-law Don's experience with Alzheimer's disease, and the photo book his daughter Kathy put together for him.

Don was able to sit down with the book and reminisce about people and events that he would have trouble recalling in conversation; the family was able to capture stories from Don's younger years that would otherwise have been lost as his dementia progressed.

Eli wants to create a digital version of this tool for capturing stories, and make it easy for people of all ages to capture and share their family stories. He hopes to be able to eventually integrate this content with sites like Ancestry.com, to make available some of the great stories behind older pictures.

He is currently running a Kickstarter (crowd-funding) campaign to help us finish the product. If you have a few minutes to watch the video on our Kickstarter page which gives a background on Storied, and are interested in what we are trying to accomplish, we'd love for you to share the campaign with your network (and possibly on your blog if it's an appropriate fit).

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About Me

I love people. I love family history and I like to write. My undergrad work in family sciences and my master's degree in sociology make my research and family history writing even more interesting to me.Our family committee recently published our third 800 page volume of ancestral histories. My father-in-law forgets many things these days, including my name, but he has never forgotten that I'm a "good girl" since I helped him publish his personal history along with that of my deceased mother-in-law.

Our family committee envisions making our work available for download to interested family members on our family websites: MJ and Hazel Christensen and Whitney-Nay Family History. Some of the chapters are already downloadable--The Nay family in Utah and the West and parts of the Christensen book series. We're now working on monthly podcasts and transforming the books into e-books.

Reading, writing and publishing family history is fun and satisfying to me. I'm convinced of the importance of knowing who we are by knowing where we came from. I started this site to share with others what I have learned and am still learning.

I welcome feedback and invite other family historians to share here as well. In the future I will be helping others to publish their own family histories.